When Idaho lawmakers scrubbed all mentions of human-caused climate change from the state’s education standards last year, they faced a swift backlash from teachers, parents and students who said that censoring science would leave students disadvantaged, jobs unfilled and the state unprepared for the future.

On Wednesday, the Idaho House Education Committee approved a revised set of standards that included some discussion of climate change. But the committee cut a section on the environmental impact of nonrenewable sources of energy and removed supporting content for standards that contained multiple references to human-driven warming.

The House committee’s decision is not final. The state’s Senate Education Committee will have a chance to weigh in, and the standards will need final approval from both chambers.

The sections on climate change that were cut had been watered down to satisfy lawmakers, and science education advocates had hoped the House committee would accept the revised standards in full. They said they were disappointed but not surprised by the committee’s decision.

43% of Canadians believe “science is a matter of opinion,” 47% think the science of global warming is “unclear”; 24% of Canadian millennials are anti-vaxxers, all according to a Leger survey of 1,514 Canadians.

The key numbers are up from last year (climate denial was 40% last year).

Under 12 years of Stephen Harper’s Petro-Conservative government, climate denial was official government policy, with the state literally incinerating its climate archives and appointing unqualified adolescents from among the party’s doorbell ringers to serve as political minders for the country’s scientists.

Many welcomed the election of the young, photogenic hereditary Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, despite a host of reactionary policies he had backed in opposition, especially continued explansion of destructive oil pipelines, a promise Trudeau renewed once Trump was elected.

]]>By: .https://www.sindark.com/2009/07/29/arguments-with-climate-change-deniers/#comment-1324148
Mon, 26 Oct 2015 18:08:00 +0000http://www.sindark.com/?p=6085#comment-1324148“Ideologies are problem because they’re very broad umbrellas of ideas and all fit together, like a puzzle it’s been assembled, you know a jigsaw puzzle has been assembled into a big picture. And so usually it covers lot more territory than climate change, climate change is one of the pieces of the puzzle. And so the difficulty with the ideology is that if the rest of the ideology fits climate change in a skeptical or denialist way, then it’s very hard, because it’s like taking trying to move the whole puzzle around. Between you and me I’ve never used this analogy before, but it seems to fit, but the obvious one is generally conservative politics. It’s hard, but not impossible, to move that one puzzle piece with the rest of, you know, big business—“business is good,” “more and more,” “grow or die capitalism,” etc., it’s hard to square that– that’s not the right word with a puzzle piece–it’s hard to fit that in with climate change. Although, I have to say that recently I’ve read some pieces that the real change some people think, is going to come when top business leaders see that it’s actually going to hurt their business. And apparently there is a fair amount of movement among big business CEOs to say, “Yeah, it doesn’t fit with my traditional views, but I’m convinced that this going to have a negative impact on my shareholders, and my shares.” So this is a bit strange, and a bit new, but this is great, because those people do have a lot of power. So that’s one,

System justification is more about the average middle-class person, who says, “Well, does this mean my lifestyle is going to change? I don’t really want to do anything because I don’t want this boat to rock, I got two cars in the driveway, and a nice house here in the suburbs, I don’t really want that to change.”

And then you have people who were kind of engineer-oriented, I know a lot of engineers who are on board, but some engineers, or some people who think engineers can solve every problem, have a techno-salvation problem, and in my view and think, well, it’s not my job to do anything, the engineers will fix it.”

Climate change is obviously a real concern. So how do deniers close their minds to reality? A scientist explains

]]>By: .https://www.sindark.com/2009/07/29/arguments-with-climate-change-deniers/#comment-1173227
Fri, 23 May 2014 23:18:22 +0000http://www.sindark.com/?p=6085#comment-1173227Recently two research teams, working independently and using different methods, reached an alarming conclusion: The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The sheet’s slide into the ocean, and the resulting sharp rise in sea levels, will probably happen slowly. But it’s irreversible. Even if we took drastic action to limit global warming right now, this particular process of environmental change has reached a point of no return.

So why would the senator make such a statement? The answer is that like that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity.

]]>By: .https://www.sindark.com/2009/07/29/arguments-with-climate-change-deniers/#comment-186501
Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:40:16 +0000http://www.sindark.com/?p=6085#comment-186501Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them — and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That — have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with. Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp. That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot. Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that “there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard to justify gunning down all those children — still, it did demonstrate that “right-wing people… may even be more efficient while killing — and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you — because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the U.S. Congress.

A series of letters signed by Kent have revealed he has faced many questions from colleagues in recent months about whether Canada needs to take action to reduce consumption of fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline that produce heat-trapping pollution and other toxic emissions in the atmosphere.

But in each of the letters, released through access to information legislation, Kent defended scientific evidence, while dismissing myths such as a suggestion from one Conservative that volcanoes were a major contributor to global warming.

“Even major volcanic eruptions emit only a very small fraction of carbon dioxide compared to annual human emissions,” Kent wrote in a Sept. 6, 2011 letter to one colleague that noted volcanic ash can cause short-term cooling in the atmosphere, lasting up to three years. “Volcanoes, in short, are not a major contributor to global warming.

Although Environment Canada’s access to information office removed the name of this “colleague” who wrote to Kent about volcanoes after receiving an article from a constituent, the letters revealed the names of other MPs who had asked the environment minister to respond to similar questions from constituents casting doubts about scientific research on climate change.

They included Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Ontario MPs Barry Devolin and Terence Young and B.C. MP David Wilks – who recently sparked controversy for suggesting he didn’t fully support the government’s budget legislation.

Kent also used his letters to defend the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been targeted by climate change contrarians for more than a decade.

“The intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007, concluded that the climate system is clearly warming, as shown by increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level,” Kent wrote in a July 14 letter sent in response to questions raised by someone who had contacted Wilks. “The report also concluded that it is very likely that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century, and that a human influence is now evident in many other aspects of the Earth’s climate.”

]]>By: .https://www.sindark.com/2009/07/29/arguments-with-climate-change-deniers/#comment-174307
Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:00:12 +0000http://www.sindark.com/?p=6085#comment-174307Over the line
Journal name: Nature
Volume: 482, Page: 440
Date published: (23 February 2012)
DOI: doi:10.1038/482440b
Published online 22 February 2012
Dishonesty, however tempting, is the wrong way to tackle climate sceptics.
In a much-quoted Editorial in March 2010 (Nature 464, 141; 2010), this publication urged researchers to acknowledge that they are involved in a street fight over the communication of climate science. So would it now be hypocritical to condemn Peter Gleick for fighting dirty? Gleick, a hydroclimatologist and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, California, admitted in a statement on news website The Huffington Post on 20 February that he had duped the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Chicago, Illinois, into handing over documents that detailed its financial support for climate sceptics. Gleick had passed these documents on to the website DeSmogBlog.com, which made them public on 14 February.
Gleick’s deception — using an e-mail address set up in someone else’s name to request the documents from Heartland — is certainly in line with some of the tactics used to undermine climate science. When in November 2009 a hacker distributed thousands of e-mails stolen from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, Heartland was prominent among those who criticized not the hacker, but the scientists who wrote the messages. However, Gleick, as he has admitted, crossed an important line when he acted in such a duplicitous way. It was a foolish action for a scientist, especially one who regularly engages with the public and critics. Society rightly looks to scientists for fairness and impartiality. Dishonesty, whatever its form and motivation, is a stain on the individual and the profession. Gleick does deserve credit for coming clean — but, it must be said, he did so only after he was publicly accused on the Internet of being involved.
The original accusation, incidentally, was more serious: that Gleick had deliberately forged a Heartland Institute memo that brought together, with suspicious convenience, the most incriminating sections of the other climate documents, which seem to have been presented to the Heartland board meeting in January. He denies doing so, and says that he received the memo, in which he is named and which Heartland says has been faked, separately from an anonymous source. The e-mail chicanery, he says, was an attempt to check whether it was genuine.

I’ve recently been involved with other scientists and scholars in Utah trying to stop the spread of outright lies, half-truths, abuses of data, and distortions about climate change. Much of this disinformation is coming from (or through) some Republican members of the Utah Legislature, and the other Republican (and some Democratic) members have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. A few local media outlets, like Provo’s Daily Herald, have also been active participants. Climate change is not just a global or national issue–it will also be played out at the state and local levels. Therefore, I see a need for some watchdogging specific to our neck of the woods. (In addition, I’m a Republican myself, and it galls me that my own party has locally fallen for a bunch of conspiracy theories and scientifically incompetent trash. In my opinion, something has to be done to save the party from disaster in the long run.)

This blog is meant to 1) archive a record of the ongoing disinformation campaign in Utah, and 2) examine it in detail. Democracy depends on accurate information being readily available to the public, and I see people who propagate such disinformation campaigns as enemies of Democracy.